27.
The bone knew what had happened to Desirée, but at first it didn’t know what to do about it. There was only so much, the bone
had discovered, that the dead could do. There was a membrane between the dead and the living. You could yell at that membrane,
and sometimes make it move, but it was always there. It was like a caul over the face of an infant. Or like a membrane caused
by diphtheria or another disease, the way flesh yields and resists when poked by a needle.
The bone floated between the past and present. It visited those it had known, and many it had not. People think the dead don’t
grieve, but they do. They grieve plenty.
The bone visited the poorhouse. It saw a solitary truck, winding up a road. It saw a man. It saw many men—spread like pepper
on the ground. They went on and on and on.
The bone saw Ruby, sleeping that first night on the couch. It watched her during those awful days in foster care, with Ruby
walking until her knees shook, her face so bleak even those passing by could not bear to look at her. No one talked to the
girl at school because she smelled like pain and grief. The families who took her in actually cared, but Ruby could not feel
their love. Because it was not mother love. It was a different kind of love—it was actually the same kind of love Ruby now
had for humankind, and her clients, and the missing, but she could not see that then. She was searching for a love that might
never exist again. Not for her.
She gave it to you, the bone whispered to Ruby, who could not hear it. She gave it to you to keep.
It was okay, the bone told itself, floating up into the soft blued sky.
It was okay because it had to be. The bone was going to keep trying to reach Ruby, because Ruby was the only one who could right this terrible wrong.
The bone would find a hole in the membrane.
It had been known to happen—sometimes ghosts, part of this world, reported to others just how the miracle had occurred.
It was said that sometimes the sharp edge of a bone—the voice—could break through. That was why people had learned to bury
the dead. So they no longer had to hear what they had to say.